Irish Genealogy News - Pages

Thursday, 8 May 2014

Join the Letters of 1916 team at Maynooth today

The Letters of 1916 project, which aims to create an online archive of images and transcription of letters written around the time of the Rising, has moved from Trinity College Dublin to NUI Maynooth.

The move signals the start of the next phase of the project's development at An Foras Feasa, The Institute for Research in Irish Historical and Cultural Traditions.

To mark the occasion, the team are holding a special launch today and anyone who is interested in learning more about the project and/or finding out how they can help, is welcome to attend.

From 5pm at Iontas Building, North Campus, you can visit the Scanning Lab and the Transcribing Lab. If you have a letter written from someone in Ireland between 1 November 1915 and 31 October 1916, you should bring it along for scanning. If you'd like to discover some of the hidden stories of this pivotal period of Ireland's history, you might like to help transcribe some of the hundreds of letters already in the database; you'll get a tutorial at the Transcribing Lab.

At 6pm the formal launch reception will be held and will be followed by talks by project director Professor Susan Schreibman; Robert Doyle, the historian and author who discovered a cache of letters from Eamonn O’Modhráin in his in-laws attic; Dr Brian Hughes, the project's Associate Editor and an expert on Michael Mallin; and Lar Joye, Curator of Irish Military History at the National Museum of Ireland.

It's free to attend, but you need to confirm your attendance at EventBrite.

The project team is also delighted to announce that the Letters of 1916 will be a demonstrator project for the National Digital Repository (DRI). Over the next year, they will be creating the fully-searchable online archive of images and transcriptions of letters, augmented by a variety of methods (such as sentiment analysis and topic modelling), as well as visualisations allowing users to engage with the corpus in new and innovative ways.